There is a continuing need for agile visible and infrared sensors which can suppress background clutter, randomly access any part of the total field of view, vary the instantaneous field of view, vary the magnification of the scene and perform tracking functions on multiple objects in a cluttered scene.
Vehicles which employ infrared sensors offer superior day/night and all weather capability. Unfortunately, the contrast of natural infrared scenes is relatively poor. Conventional methods for processing infrared scene information require a large number of scene samples and extensive data processing of the sampled information. There is, therefore, a need for methods and apparatus for preprocessing optical data to improve the performance of sensors.